In a message dated 8/25/2008 11:13:00 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
afarr@... writes:

Hey, if you guys want to spout off about someone, why do you have to involve
the rest of the group -


I can answer this question, Allan.
I consider many of you as "the rest of the group" because I published
Quicktalk/QTALK for some 15 years. I was here before belly boards, LaRue brake
mods, and Jim-Bob six packs. What I know that you may not is that there are many
graduates of high school aeronautical engineering programs and other curbstone
colleges who know many more things that Burt Rutan never dreamed of (and
he's got a pretty wild imagination). Now LaRue flew his mod successfully and so
did Jim-Bob with their six packs. But when you were in grade school and I had
black hair there were many other yokels who were re-engineering the Q design
from their mouths with fantasy and guesswork. If you keep it in your own
head until you prove it out or crash, that's OK. But if you publicize your idea,
get someone else excited to try it and HE wastes his money and/or crashes...
that ain't OK. As an editor, I took the responsibility to keep unproven
ideas out of print and I railed loudly against modifications of these airframes.
In the age of the internet this responsibility is not so easy to apply.
There are at least 2 dead but bold Q-guys who did things that others of us
KNEW were wrong. And you can suppose that some of us even today don't want that
to happen again. And so, even if it offends your sensibility, some of us
feel responsible to react loudly on this web to unsupported data, a history of
poor decision making, unusual or quirky ideas, questionable engineering
pontifications, etc. etc. so as to raise a red flag of warning to newbies who,
unlike yourself, can't easily distinguish between helpful and harmful
information. It's a free country and some of us are going to keep on top of this... it
may be a matter of life and death to someone.

And just to show how pervasive "funky mod thinking" is, just this very
weekend an apparently otherwise intelligent individual proposed an "appliance" to
be added to his Q which he thought would slow down the approach and allow him
to get into 1500-1700ft. short fields. THIS ISN'T THE PLANE. If you want to
fly around Nevada investigating old ghost towns, buy a gatdamn Piper Cub. (I
hope that doesn't offend you).

And that's my opinion for the "rest of the group" that came after 1990.

j.



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